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UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 



By LORD DUNSANY 



FIVE PLAYS : The Gods of the Mountains ; 
The Golden Doom ; King Argimenes and 
the Unknown Warrior ; The Glittering 
Gate ; The Lost Silk Hat 

FIFTY-ONE TALES 

TALES OF WAR 

UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 



UNHAPPY 
FAR-OFF THINGS 



BY 
LORD DUNSANY 



N ort-kTO TI 




aaWVAP-CnS 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1919 






Copyright, 1919, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



All rights reserved 
Published, November, 1919 



NOV 13 1913 



Norinooli press 
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



©CI.A536549 






B SHrge of IDictors 

Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky 
Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow 
But over hollows full of old wire go 

Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie 

With wasted iron that the guns passed by 
When they went eastwards like a tide at flow 
There blow thy trumpet that the dead may 
know, 

Who waited for thy coming, Victory. 

It is not we that have deserved thy wreath. 

They waited there among the towering weeds : 

The deep mud burned under the thermite's 

breath, 

And winter cracked the bones that no man 

heeds : 

Hundreds of nights flamed by : the seasons 

passed, 
And thou hast come to them at last, at last ! 



FOREWORD 

I have chosen a title that shall show 
that I make no claim for this book to be 
"up-to-date." As the first tale indicates 
I hoped to show, to as many as might care 
to read my words, something of the extent 
of the wrongs that the people of France 
had suffered. There is no such need any 
longer. The tales, so far as they went, I 
gather together here for those that read 
my books. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

A Dibge of Victory . . . . v 

I The Cathedral of Arras .... 1 

H A Good War 11 

m The House with Two Stories . . .21 

IV Bermondsey versus Wurtemburg . . 31 

V On an Old Battle Field . . . .39 

VI The Real Thing 49 

VII A Garden of Arras . . . . .57 

Vllt After Hell 67 

IX A Happy Valley 73 

X In Bethune 79 

XI In an Old Dra wing-Room . . . .89 

XH The Homes of Arras 97 



THE CATHEDRAL OF ARRAS 



THE CATHEDRAL OF ARRAS 

ON the great steps of Arras Cathedral 
I saw a procession, in silence, stand- 
ing still. 

They were in orderly and perfect lines, 
stirring or swaying slightly. Sometimes 
they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned 
together, but for the most part they were 
motionless. It was the time when the 
fashion was just changing and some were 
newly all in shining yellow, while others 
still wore green. 

I went up the steps amongst them, the 
only human thing, for men and women 
worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and 
the trees have come instead ; little humble 
things all less than four years old, in great 
numbers thronging the steps processionally, 
and growing in perfect rows just where 



4 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

step meets step. They have come to Arras 
with the wind and the rain ; which enter the 
aisles together whenever they will, and go 
wherever man went; they have such a 
reverent air, the young limes on the three 
flights of steps, that you would say they 
did not know that Arras Cathedral was 
fallen on evil days, that they did not know 
they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but 
thought that these great walls open to stars 
and sun were the natural and fitting place 
for the worship of little weeds. 

Behind them the shattered houses of 
Arras seemed to cluster about the cathedral 
as, one might fancy easily, hurt and fright- 
ened children, so wistful are their gaping 
windows and old, gray, empty gables, so 
melancholy and puzzled. They are more 
like a little old people come upon trouble, 
gazing at their great elder companion and 
not knowing what to do. 

But the facts of Arras are sadder than a 
poet's most tragic fancies. In the western 
front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars 



THE CATHEDRAL OF ARRAS 5 

rising from the ground ; above them stood 
four more. Of the four upper pillars the 
two on the left are gone, swept away by 
shells from the North : and a shell has 
passed through the neck of one of the two 
that is left just as a bullet might go through 
a daffodil's stem. 

The left-hand corner of that western wall 
has been caught from the North, by some 
tremendous shell which has torn the whole 
corner down in a mound of stone : and 
still the walls have stood. 

I went in through the western doorway. 
All along the nave lay a long heap of white 
stones, with grass and weeds on the top, 
and a little trodden path over the grass 
and weeds. This is all that remained of 
the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any 
chairs or pews there may have been in the 
nave, or anything that may have hung 
above them. It was all down but one 
slender arch that crossed the nave just at 
the transept ; it stood out against the sky, 
and all who saw it wondered how it stood. 



6 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

In the southern aisle panes of green glass, 
in twisted frames of lead, here and there 
lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple- 
tree after a hailstorm in spring. The 
aisles still had their roofs over them which 
those stout old walls held up in spite of all. 

Where the nave joins the transept the 
ruin is most enormous. Perhaps there was 
more to bring down there, so the Germans 
brought it down : there may have been a 
tower there, for all I know, or a spire. 

I stood on the heap and looked towards 
the altar. To my left all was ruin. To 
my right two old saints in stone stood by 
the southern door. The door had been 
forced open long ago, and stood as it was 
opened, partly broken. A great round hole 
gaped in the ground outside; it was this 
that had opened the door. 

Just beyond the big heap, on the left of 
the chancel, stood something made of wood, 
which almost certainly had been the organ. 

As I looked at these things there passed 
through the desolate sanctuaries, and down 



THE CATHEDRAL OF ARRAS 7 

an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, 
a sad old woman, sad even for a woman of 
Northeast France. She seemed to be 
looking after the mounds and stones that 
had once been the Cathedral ; perhaps she 
had once been the Bishop's servant, or the 
wife of one of the vergers ; she only re- 
mained of all who had been there in other 
days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. 
I spoke to her. All Arras, she said, was 
ruined. The great Cathedral was ruined; 
her own family were ruined utterly, and 
she pointed to where the sad houses gazed 
from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, 
she said; but there must be no armistice. 
No armistice. No. It was necessary that 
there should be no armistice at all. No 
armistice with Germans. 

She passed on, resolute and sad, and the 
guns boomed on beyond Arras. 

A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes' 
heads on his collar, showed me a picture 
postcard with a photograph of the chancel 
as it was five years ago. It was the very 



8 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

chancel before which I was standing. To 
see that photograph astonished me, and to 
know that the camera that took it must 
have stood where I was standing, only a 
little lower down, under the great heap. 

Though one knew there had been an 
altar there, and candles and roof and carpet, 
and all the solemnity of a cathedral's in- 
terior, yet to see that photograph and to 
stand on that weedy heap, in the wind, 
under the jackdaws, was a contrast with 
which the mind fumbled. 

I walked a little with the French inter- 
preter. We came to a little shrine in the 
southern aisle. It had been all paved 
with marble, and the marble was broken 
into hundreds of pieces, and some one had 
carefully picked up all the bits, and laid 
them together on the altar. 

And this pathetic heap that was gathered 
of broken bits had drawn many to stop and 
gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they 
had written their names on them : every 
bit had a name on it. With but a touch of 



THE CATHEDRAL OF ARRAS 9 

irony the Frenchman said "All that is 
necessary to bring your name to posterity 
is to write it on one of these stones." " No," 
I said, "I will do it by describing all this." 
And we both laughed. 

I have not done it yet : there is more to 
say of Arras. As I begin the tale of ruin 
and wrong, the man who did it totters. 
His gaudy power begins to stream away 
like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne 
will be bare, and I shall have but begun to 
say what I have to say of calamity in 
cathedral and little gardens of Arras. 

The winter of the Hohenzollerns will 
come ; sceptre, uniforms, stars and courtiers 
all gone ; still the world will not know half 
of the bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring 
will bring a new time and cover the trenches 
with green, and the pigeons will preen 
themselves on the shattered towers, and 
the lime trees along the steps will grow 
taller and brighter, and happier men will 
sing in the streets untroubled by any War 
Lord ; by then perhaps I may have told, to 



10 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

such as care to read, what such a war did 
in an ancient town, already romantic when 
romance was young, when war came sud- 
denly without mercy, without pity, out of 
the North and East, on little houses, carved 
galleries and gardens ; churches, cathedrals 
and the jackdaw nests. 



A GOOD WAR 



II 

A GOOD WAR 

NIETZSCHE said: "You have heard 
that a good cause justifies any war, 
but I say unto you that a good war justifies 
any cause." 

A man was walking alone over a plain so 
desolate that, if you have never seen it, the 
mere word desolation could never convey 
to you the melancholy surroundings that 
mourned about this man on his lonely walk. 
Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless 
road all dead as mourners suddenly stricken 
dead in some funeral procession. By this 
road he had come ; but when he had reached 
a certain point he turned from the road at 
once, branching away to the left, led by a 
line of bushes that may once have been 
a lane. For some while his feet had rustled 



14 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

through long-neglected grass ; sometimes 
he lifted them up to step over a telephone 
wire that lolled over old entanglements and 
bushes; often he came to rusty strands of 
barbed wire and walked through them where 
they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by 
huge shells ; then his feet hissed on through 
the grass again, dead grass that had hissed 
about his boots all through the afternoon. 

Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a 
crater, weary with such walking as he had 
never seen before ; and after he had stayed 
there a little while a cat that seemed to have 
its home in that wild place started suddenly 
up and leaped away over the weeds. It 
seemed an animal totally wild, and utterly 
afraid of man. 

Grey bare hills surrounded the waste : a 
partridge called far off : evening was draw- 
ing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a 
certain fervour, as one that pursues with 
devotion a lamentable quest. Looking 
round him as he left his resting place he 
saw a cabbage or two that after some while 



A GOOD WAR 15 

had come back to what was a field and had 
sprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A 
yellowing convolvulus climbed up a dead 
weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth 
were all about him. It would be no better 
when he went on. Still he went on. A 
flower or two peeped up among the weeds. 
He stood up and looked at the landscape 
and drew no hope from that ; the shattered 
trunk of a stricken tree leered near him, 
white trenches scarred the hill side. 

He followed an old trench through a 
hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by 
a great rusty shell that had not burst, 
passed by a dug-out where something grey 
seemed to lie down at the bottom of many 
steps. Black fungi grew near the entrance. 
He went on and on over shell-holes, passing 
round them where they were deep, stepping 
into or over the small ones. Little burrs 
clutched at him ; he went rustling on, the 
only sound in the waste but the clicking of 
shattered iron. Now he was among nettles. 
He came by many small unnatural valleys. 



16 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

He passed more trenches only guarded by- 
fungi. 

While it was light he followed little paths, 
marvelling who made them. Once he got 
into a trench. Dandelions leaned across 
it as though to bar his way, believing man 
to have gone and to have no right to re- 
turn. Weeds thronged in thousands here. 
It was the day of the weeds. It was only 
they that seemed to triumph in those fields 
deserted of man. He passed on down the 
trench, and never knew whose trench it 
once had been. Frightful shells had 
smashed it here and there, and had twisted 
iron as though round gigantic fingers, that 
had twiddled it idly a moment and let it 
drop to lie in the rain for ever. 

He passed more dug-outs and black fungi 
watching them, and then he left the trench, 
going straight on over the open : again dead 
grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes 
small wire sang faintly. He passed through 
a belt of nettles and thence to dead grass 
again. And now the light of the afternoon 



A GOOD WAR 17 

was beginning to dwindle away. He had 
intended to reach his journey's end by 
daylight, for he was past the time of life 
when one wanders after dark, but he had 
not contemplated the difficulty of walking 
over that road or dreamed that lanes he 
knew should be so foundered and merged 
in that mournful desolate moor. 

Evening was falling fast, still he kept on. 
It was the time when the cornstacks would 
once have begun to grow indistinct and 
slowly turn grey in the greyness, and 
homesteads one by one would have lit 
their innumerable lights. But evening now 
came down on a dreary desolation : and 
a cold wind arose ; and the traveller heard 
the mournful sound of iron flapping on 
broken things, and knew that this was the 
sound that would haunt the waste for ever. 

And evening settled down, a huge grey 
canvas waiting for sombre pictures, a 
setting for all the dark tales of the world, 
haunted if ever a grizzly place was haunted 
ever in any century, in any land ; but not 



18 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

by mere ghosts from all those thousands 
of graves and half-buried bodies and sepul- 
chral shell-holes; haunted by things huger 
and more disastrous than that; haunted 
by wailing ambitions, under the stars or 
moon, drifting across the rubbish that once 
was villages, which strews the lonely plain ; 
the lost ambitions of two Emperors and a 
Sultan, wailing from wind to wind, and 
whimpering for dominion of the world. 

The cold wind blew over the blasted 
heath and bits of broken iron flapped on 
and on. 

And now the traveller hurried, for night 
was falling, and such a night as three witches 
might have brewed in a cauldron. He 
went on eagerly but with infinite sadness. 
Over the sky line strange rockets went up 
from the war, peered oddly over the earth 
and went down again. Very far off a few 
soldiers lit a little fire of their own. The 
night grew colder; tap, tap went broken 
iron. 

And at last the traveller stopped in the 



A GOOD WAR 19 

lonely night, and looked round him atten- 
tively, and appeared to be satisfied that he 
had come within sight of his journey's end, 
although to ordinary eyes the spot to which 
he had come differed in no way from the 
rest of the waste. 

He went no further but turned round 
and round, peering piece by piece at that 
weedy and cratered earth. 

He was looking for the village where he 
was born. 



THE HOUSE WITH TWO STORIES 



Ill 

THE HOUSE WITH TWO STORIES 

I CAME again to Croisilles. 
I looked for the sunken road that we 
used to hold in support, with its row of 
little shelters in the bank and the carved 
oak saints above them here and there 
that had survived the church in Croisilles. 
I could have found it with my eyes shut. 
With my eyes open I could not find it. I 
did not recognise the lonely metalled road 
down which lorries were rushing for the 
little lane so full of life, whose wheel-ruts 
were three years old. 

As I gazed about me looking for our line 
I passed an old French civilian looking down 
at a slight mound of white stone that rose 
a little higher than the road. He was 



U UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

walking about uncertainly, when first I 
noticed him, as though he was not sure 
where he was. But now he stood quite 
still, looking down at the mound. 

" Voila ma maison" he said. 

He said no more than that : this as- 
tounding remark, this gesture that indicated 
such calamity, were quite simply made. 
There was nothing whatever of theatrical 
pose that we wrongly associate with the 
French because they conceal their emotions 
less secretly than we ; there were no tragic 
tones in his voice : only a trace of deep 
affection showed in one of the words he 
used. He spoke as a woman might say 
of her only child, "Look at my baby." 

" Voila ma maison" he said. 

I tried to say in his language what I felt ; 
and after my attempt he spoke of his house. 

It was very old. Down underneath, he 
said, it dated from feudal times; though 
I did not quite make out whether all that 
lay under that mound had been so old or 
whether he only meant the cellars of his 



HOUSE WITH TWO STORIES 25 

house. It was a fine high house, he said; 
as much as two stories high. No one that 
is familiar with houses of fifty stories, none 
even that has known palaces, will smile at 
this old man's efforts to tell of his high 
house, and to make me believe that it rose 
to two stories high, as we stood together 
by that sad white mound. He told me 
his son was killed. And that disaster 
strangely did not move me so much as 
the white mound that had been a house 
and had had two stories, for it seems to 
be common to every French family with 
whose fathers I have chanced to speak in 
ruined cities or on busy roads of France. 

He pointed to a huge white mound be- 
yond on the top of which some one had 
stuck a small cross of wood. "The church," 
he said. And that I knew already. 

In very inadequate French I tried to 
comfort him. I told him that surely France 
would build his house again. Perhaps 
even the Allies ; for I could not believe 
that we shall have done enough if we merely 



26 UNHAPPY FAR OFF-THINGS 

drive the Germans out of France and leave 
this poor old man still wandering home- 
less. I told him that surely in the future 
Croisilles would stand again. 

He took no interest in anything that I 
said. His house of two stories was down, 
his son was dead, the little village of Croi- 
silles had gone away ; he had only one hope 
from the future. When I had finished 
speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed 
thick stick that he carried, up to the level 
of his throat, surely his son's old trench 
stick, and there he let it dangle from a 
piece of string in the handle, which he held 
against his neck. He watched me shrewdly 
and attentively meanwhile, for I was a 
stranger and was to be taught something 
I might not know, a thing that was nec- 
essary for all men to learn. "Le Kaiser" 
he said. "Yes," I said, "the Kaiser." 
But I pronounced the word Kaiser dif- 
ferently from him, and he repeated again 
"Le Kaiser", and watched me closely to 
be sure that I understood. And then he 



HOUSE WITH TWO STORIES 27 

said "Pendu", and made the stick quiver a 
little as it dangled from its string. "Oui" 
I said, "Pendu." 

Did I understand? He was not yet 
quite sure. It was important that this 
thing should be quite decided between us 
as we stood on this road through what had 
been Croisilles, where he had lived through 
many sunny years and I had dwelt for a 
season amongst rats. "Pendu! Pendu!" 
he said. Yes, I agreed. 

It was all right. The old man almost 
smiled. 

I offered him a cigarette and we lit two 
from an apparatus of flint and steel and 
petrol that the old man had in his pocket. 

He showed me a photograph of himself 
and a passport to prove, I suppose, that he 
was not a spy. One could not recognise 
the likeness, for it must have been taken 
on some happier day, before he had seen 
his house of two stories lying there by the 
road. But he was no spy, for there were 
tears in his eyes; and Prussians, I think, 



28 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

have no tears for what we saw as we gazed 
across the village of Croisilles. 

I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no 
more, I spoke no more of the new Croisilles 
shining through the future years ; for these 
were not the things that he saw in the 
future and these were not the hopes of the 
poor old num. He had one dark hope of 
the future, and no others. He hoped to 
see the Kaiser hung for the wrong he had 
done to Croisilles. It was for this hope he 
lived. 

Madame or Senor of whatever far coun- 
try, who may chance to see these words, 
blame not this old man for the fierce hope 
he cherished. It was the only hope he 
had. You, Madame, with your garden, 
your house, your church, the village where 
all know you, you may hope as a Christian 
should ; there is wide room for hope in your 
future. You shall see the seasons move 
over your garden, you shall busy yourself 
with your home, and speak and share with 
your neighbors innumerable small joys, 



HOUSE WITH TWO STORIES 29 

and find consolation and beauty, and at 
last rest, in and around the church whose 
spire you see from your home. You, Sefior, 
with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps 
wearing already some sword that you wore 
once, you can turn back to your memories, 
or look with hope to the future, with equal 
ease. 

The man that I met in Croisilles had 
none of these things at all. He had that 
one hope only. 

Do not, I pray you, by your voice or 
vote, or by any power or influence that you 
have, do anything to take away from this 
poor old Frenchman the only little hope 
that he has left. The more trivial his odd 
hope appears to you compared with your 
own high hopes that come so easily to you 
amongst all your fields and houses, the 
more cruel a thing must it be to take it 
from him. 

I learned many things in Croisilles, and 
the last of them is this strange one the old 
man taught me. I turned and shook 



30 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

hands with him and said Good-bye, for I 
wished to see again our old front line that 
we used to hold over the hill, now empty, 
silent at last. "The Boche is defeated," 
I said. "Vaincu, Vaincu" he repeated. 
And I left him with something almost like 
happiness looking out of his tearful eyes. 



BERMONDSEY VERSUS 
WURTEMBURG 



IV 

BERMONDSEY VERSUS 
WURTEMBURG 

THE trees grew thinner and thinner 
along the road, then ceased altogether, 
and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of 
the ghosts of murdered trees, all grey and 
deserted. 

Descending into Albert past trees in their 
agony we came all at once on the houses. 
You did not see them far off as in other 
cities ; we came on them all at once as you 
come on a corpse in the grass. 

We stopped and stood by a house that 
was covered with plaster marked off to 
look like great stones, its pitiful pretence 
laid bare, the slates gone and the rooms 
gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel. 
Near it lay an iron railing, a handrail 



34 UNHAPPY. FAR-OFF THINGS 

blown there from the railway bridge; a 
shrapnel bullet had passed through its 
twisted stem as though it had gone through 
butter. And beside the handrail lay one 
of the great steel supports of the bridge, 
that had floated there upon some flaming 
draught; the end of it bent and splayed 
as though it had been a slender cane that 
some one had shoved too hard into the earth. 

There had been a force abroad in Albert 
that could do these things, an iron force 
that had no mercy for iron, a mighty 
mechanical contrivance that could take 
machinery and pull it all to pieces in a 
moment as a child takes a flower to pieces 
petal by petal. 

When such a force was abroad what 
chance had man ? It had come down upon 
Albert suddenly, and railway lines and 
bridges had dropped and withered, and 
the houses had stooped down in the blasting 
heat, and in that attitude I found them 
still, — worn-out, melancholy heaps over- 
come by disaster. 



BERMONDSEY 35 

Pieces of paper rustled about like foot- 
steps, dirt covered the ruins, fragments of 
rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as 
that which they had destroyed. Cleaned 
up and polished, and priced a,t half-a- 
crown apiece, these fragments may look 
romantic some day in a London shop ; 
but to-day in Albert they look unclean and 
untidy like a cheap knife sticking up from 
a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is 
long out of fashion. 

The stale smell of war arose from the 
desolation. 

A British helmet dented in like an old 
bowler, but tragic, not absurd, lay near 
a barrel and a teapot. 

On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty 
and smashed rafters was written in red 
paint KOMP e I. M. B. K. 184. The red 
paint had dripped down the wall from 
every letter. Verily we stood upon the 
scene of the murder. 

Opposite those red letters across the road 
was a house with traces of a pleasant 



36 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

ornament below the sills of the windows, 
a design of grapes and vine. Some one 
had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg out- 
side the door. 

Perhaps the cheery design on the wall 
attracted me. I entered the house and 
looked round. 

A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a 
little decanter, only chipped at the lip, and 
part of a haversack of horse-skin. There 
were pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud 
buried them deep : it was like the age-old 
dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. 
A man's waistcoat lay on the mud and part 
of a woman's stays : the waistcoat was 
black and was probably kept for Sundays. 
That was all that there was to see on 
the ground floor; no more flotsam than 
that had come down to these days from 
peace. 

A forlorn stairway tried still to wind 
upstairs. It went up out of a corner of the 
room. It seemed still to believe that there 
was an upper story, still to feel that this 



BERMONDSEY 37 

was a house; there seemed a hope in the 
twists of that battered staircase that men 
would yet come again and seek sleep at 
evening by the way of those broken steps ; 
the handrail and the banisters streamed 
down from the top, a woman's dress lolled 
down from the upper room above those 
aimless steps, the laths of the ceiling 
gaped, the plaster was gone ; of all the hopes 
men hope that can never be fulfilled, of 
all desires that ever come too late, most 
futile was the hope expressed by that stair- 
way's posture that ever a family would 
come home there again or tread those 
steps once more. And, if in some far 
country one should hope, who has not seen 
Albert, out of compassion for these poor 
people of France, that where a staircase still 
remains there may be enough of a house to 
shelter those who called it home again, I 
will tell one thing more : there blew inside 
that house the same wind that blew outside, 
the wind that wandered free over miles of 
plains wandered unchecked through that 



38 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

house; there was no indoors or outdoors 
any more. 

And on the wall of the room in which I 
stood, some one had proudly written his 
regiment's name, The 156th Wurtem- 
burgers. It was written in chalk; and 
another man had come and had written 
two words before it and had recorded the 
name of his own regiment too. And the 
writing that remains after these two men 
are gone, and the lonely house is silent but 
for the wind and the things that creak as 
it blows, the only message of this deserted 
house, is this mighty record, this rare line 
of history, illwritten : "Lost by the 156th 
Wurtemburgers, retaken by the Bermond- 
sey Butterflies." 

Two men wrote that sentence between 
them. And, as with Homer, no one knows 
who they were. And like Homer their 
words were epic. 



ON AN OLD BATTLE FIELD 



ON AN OLD BATTLE FIELD 

I ENTERED an old battle field through a 
garden gate, a pale green gate by the 
Bapaume- Arras road. The cheerful green 
attracted me in the deeps of the desolation 
as an emerald might in a dust-bin. I 
entered through that homely garden gate : 
it had no hinges, no pillars, it lolled on a 
heap of stone. I came to it from the road ; 
this alone was not battle field; the road 
alone was made and tended and kept; all 
the rest was battle field as far as the eye 
could see. Over a large whitish heap lay 
a Virginia creeper, turning a dull crimson. 
And the presence of this creeper mourning 
there in the waste showed unmistakably 
that the heap had been a house. All the 
living things were gone that had called this 
white heap Home: the father would be 



42 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

fighting somewhere; the children would 
have fled, if there had been time ; the dog 
would have gone with them, or perhaps, 
if there was not time, he served other 
masters; the cat would have made a lair 
for herself and stalked mice at night through 
the trenches. All the live things that we 
ever consider were gone ; the creeper alone 
remained, the only mourner, clinging to 
fallen stones that had supported it once. 
And I knew by its presence here there 
had been a house. And by the texture or 
composition of the ruin all round I saw that 
a village had stood there. There are calami- 
ties one does not contemplate, when one 
thinks of time and change. Death, passing 
away, even ruin, are all the human lot; 
but one contemplates ruin as brought by 
kindly ages, coming slowly at last, with 
lichen and ivy and moss, its harsher aspects 
all hidden with green, coming with dignity 
and in due season. Thus our works should 
pass away; our worst fears contemplated 
no more than this. 



ON AN OLD BATTLE FIELD 43 

But here in a single day, perhaps in a 
moment with one discharge from a battery, 
all the little things that one family cared 
for, their house, their garden, and the 
garden paths, and then the village and the 
road through the village, and the old land- 
marks that the old people remembered, and 
countless treasured things, were all turned 
into rubbish. 

And these things that one did not contem- 
plate have happened for hundreds of miles, 
with such disaster vast plains and hills are 
covered, because of the German war. 

Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches 
and dug-outs, lie in the rubbish and weeds 
under the intricate wreckage of peace and 
war. It will be a bad place years hence 
for wanderers lost at night. 

When the village went, trenches came; 
and, in the same storm that had crumbled 
the village, the trenches withered too; 
shells still thump on to the North, but 
peace and war alike have deserted the vil- 
lage. Grass has begun to return over torn 



44 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

earth on edges of trenches. Abundant wire 
rusts away by its twisted stakes of steel. 
Not a path of old, not a lane nor a doorway 
there, but is barred and cut off by wire; 
and the wire in its turn has been cut by 
shells and lies in ungathered swathes. A 
pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, 
and may be of peace or of war, it is too 
broken down for any one to say. A great 
bar of iron lies cracked across as though one 
of the elder giants had handled it carelessly. 
Another mound near by with an old green 
beam sticking out of it was also once a 
house. A trench runs by it. A German 
bomb with its wooden handle, some bottles, 
a bucket, a petrol tin and some bricks and 
stones, lie in the trench. A young elder 
tree grows amongst them. And over all 
the ruin and rubbish Nature with all her 
wealth and luxury comes back to her old 
inheritance, holding again the land that 
she held so long, before the houses came. 

A garden gate of iron has been flung 
across a well. Then a deep cellar into 



ON AN OLD BATTLE FIELD 45 

which a whole house seems to have slanted 
down. In the midst of all this is an or- 
chard. A huge shell has uprooted, but not 
killed, an apple-tree; another apple-tree 
stands stone dead on the edge of a crater : 
most of the trees are dead. 

British aeroplanes drone over continually. 
A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, 
dragged by a slow engine with caterpillar 
wheels. The gun is all blotched green and 
yellow. Four or five men are seated on 
the huge barrel alone. 

Dark old steps near the orchard run 
down into a dug-out, with a cartridge-case 
tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat 
when the gas came. A telephone wire lies 
listlessly by the opening. A patch of 
Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale 
mauve, and a bright yellow flower beside 
them, show where a garden used to stand 
near by. Above the dug-out a patch of 
jagged earth shows in three clear layers 
under the weeds : four inches of grey road- 
metal, imported, for all this country is chalk 



46 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

and clay ; two inches of flint below it ; and 
under that an inch of a bright red stone. 
We are looking then at a road, a road 
through a village trodden by men and 
women, and the hooves of horses and 
familiar modern things, a road so buried, 
so shattered, so overgrown, showing by 
chance an edge in the midst of the wilder- 
ness, that I could seem rather to have 
discovered the track of the Dinosaur in 
prehistoric clays than the highway of a 
little village that only five years ago was 
full of human faults and joys and songs 
and tiny tears. Down that road before 
the plans of the Kaiser began to fumble 
with the earth, down that road, — but it 
is useless to look back, we are too far away 
from five years ago, too far away from 
thousands of ordinary things, that never 
seemed as though they would ever peer at 
us over chasms of time, out of another 
age, utterly far off, irrevocably removed 
from our ways and days. They are gone, 
those times, gone like the Dinosaur, gone 



ON AN OLD BATTLE FIELD 47 

with bows and arrows and the old knightlier 
days. No splendour marks their sunset 
where I sit, no dignity of ruined houses, 
or derelict engines of war; all equally are 
scattered dirtily in the mud, and common 
weeds overpower them; it is not ruin but 
rubbish that covers the ground here and 
spreads its untidy flood for hundreds and 
hundreds of miles. 

A band plays in Arras, to the North and 
East the shells go thumping on. 

The very origins of things are in doubt, 
so much is jumbled together. It is as hard 
to make out just where the trenches ran, 
and which was No Man's Land, as it is to 
tell the houses from garden and orchard 
and road : the rubbish covers all. It is 
as though the ancient forces of Chaos had 
come back from the abyss to fight against 
order and man, and Chaos had won. So 
lies this village of France. 

As I left it a rat, with something in its 
mouth, holding its head high, ran right 
across the village. 



THE REAL THING 



VI 
THE REAL THING 

ONCE at manoeuvres, as the Prussian 
Crown Prince charged at the head of 
his regiment; as sabres gleamed, plumes 
streamed, and hooves thundered behind 
him, he is reported to have said to one 
that galloped near him : "Ah ! If only 
this were the real thing !" 

One need not doubt that the report is 
true. So a young man might feel as he 
led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene 
would fire the blood ; all those young men 
and fine uniforms and good horses, all 
coming on behind, everything streaming 
that could float on the air, everything 
jingling then which could ever make a 
sound, a bright sky no doubt over the 



52 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and 
horses to gulp; and, behind, the clinking 
and jingling, the long roll of hooves thunder- 
ing. Such a scene might well stir emotions 
to sigh for the splendours of battle. 

This is one side of war. Mutilation and 
death are another ; misery, cold and dirt ; 
pain, and the intense loneliness of men left 
behind by armies, with much to think of, 
no hope, and a day or two to live. But we 
understand that glory covers that. 

There is yet a third side. 

I came to Albert when the fight was 
far from it; only at night you saw any 
signs of war, when clouds flashed now 
and then and curious rockets peered. Al- 
bert robbed of peace was deserted even 
by war. 

I will not say that Albert was devastated 
or desolate, for these long words have 
different interpretations and may easily 
be exaggerated. A German agent might 
say to you "Devastated is rather a strong 
word, and desolate is a matter of opinion." 



THE REAL THING 53 

And so you might never know what Albert 
is like. 

I will tell you what I saw. 

Albert was a large town. I will not 
write of all of it. 

I sat down near a railway bridge at the 
edge of the town; I think I was near the 
station; and small houses had stood there 
with little gardens; such as porters and 
other railway folk would have lived in. 
I sat down on the railway and looked at 
one of these houses, for it had clearly been 
a house. It was at the back of it that most 
remained, in what must have been a garden. 
A girder torn up like a pack of cards lay 
on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall 
by an apple-tree. 

Lower down in the heap was the frame- 
work of a large four-poster bed ; through 
it all a vine came up quite green and still 
alive; and at the edge of the heap lay a 
doll's green pram. Small though the house 
had been there was evidence in that heap 
of some prosperity in more than one 



54 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

generation. For the four-poster bed had 
been a fine one, good work in sound old 
timber, before the bits of the girder had 
driven it into the wall ; and the green pram 
must have been the dowry of no ordinary 
doll, but one with the best yellow curls, 
whose blue eyes could move. One blue 
columbine close by mourned alone for the 
garden. 

The wall and the vine and the bed and 
the girder lay in an orchard, and some of 
the apple-trees were standing yet, though 
the orchard had been terribly worked by 
shell fire. All that still stood were dead. 
Some stood upon the very edge of craters ; 
their leaves and twigs and bark had been 
stripped by one blast in a moment ; and 
they had tottered, with stunted, black, 
gesticulating branches ; and so they stood 
to-day. 

The curls of a mattress lay onthe ground, 
clipped once from a horse's mane. 

After looking for some while across the 
orchard one suddenly noticed that the 



THE REAL THING 55 

Cathedral had stood on the other side. It 
was draped, when we saw it closer, as with 
a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof having 
come down and covered it. 

Near the house of that petted doll (as 
I came to think of it) a road ran by on the 
other side of the railway. Great shells 
had dropped along it with terrible regular- 
ity. You could imagine Death striding 
down it with exact five-yard paces, on his 
own day, claiming his own. As I stood 
on the road something whispered behind 
me, and I saw, stirring round with the 
wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, 
a double page of a book open at Chapter 
two: and Chapter two was headed with 
the proverb : " Un malheur ne vient jamais 
seul." Misfortunes never come singly ! 
And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes 
every five yards as far as the eye could see, 
and flat beyond it the whole city in ruin. 
What harmless girl or old man had been 
reading that dreadful prophecy when the 
Germans came down upon Albert and 



56 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

involved it, and themselves, and that book, 
all except those two pages, in such multipli- 
cation of ruin ? 

Surely indeed there is a third side to war : 
for what had the doll done, that used to 
have a green pram, to deserve to share 
thus in the fall and punishment of an 
Emperor ? 



A GARDEN OF ARRAS 



VII 
A GARDEN OF ARRAS 

AS I walked through Arras from the 
Spanish gate gardens flashed as I 
went, one by one, through the houses. 

I stepped in over the window-sill of one 
of the houses, attracted by the gleam of a 
garden dimly beyond : and went through 
the empty house, empty of people, empty of 
furniture, empty of plaster, and entered 
the garden through an empty doorway. 

When I came near it seemed less like a 
garden. At first it had almost seemed to 
beckon to passers-by in the street; so rare 
are gardens now in this part of France, that 
it seemed to have more than garden's 
share of mystery, all in the silence there 
at the back of the silent house ; but when 
one entered it some of the mystery went, 
and seemed to hide in a further part of the 



60 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

garden amongst wild shrubs and innumer- 
able weeds. 

British aeroplanes frequently roared over, 
disturbing the congregation of Arras Cathe- 
dral a few hundred yards away, who rose 
cawing and wheeled over the garden; for 
only jackdaws come to Arras Cathedral 
now, besides a few pigeons. 

Unkempt beside me a bamboo flourished 
wildly, having no need of man. On the 
other side of the small wild track that had 
been the garden path the skeletons of hot- 
houses stood, surrounded by nettles ; their 
pipes lie all about, shattered and riddled 
through. 

Branches of rose break up through the 
myriad nettles, but only to be seized and 
choked by columbine. A late moth looks 
for flowers not quite in vain. It hovers on 
wing-beats that are invisibly swift by its 
lonely autumn flower, then darts away over 
the desolation which is no desolation to a 
moth : man has destroyed man ; nature 
comes back : it is well : that must be the 



A GARDEN OF ARRAS 61 

brief philosophy of myriads of tiny things 
whose way of life one seldom considered 
before; now that man's cities are down, 
now that ruin and misery confront us 
whatever way we turn, one notices more 
the small things that are left. 

One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, 
a tumbled mass that might be a piece of 
Babylon, if archeologists should come to 
study it. But it is too sad to study, too un- 
tidy to have any interest, and, alas, too 
common : there are hundreds of miles of this. 

The other greenhouse, a sad, ungainly 
skeleton, is possessed by grass and weeds. 
On the raised centre many flowerpots were 
neatly arranged once : they stand in orderly 
lines, but each separate one is broken : 
none contain flowers any more, but only 
grass. And the grass of the greenhouse 
lies there in showers, all grey. No one has 
tidied anything up there for years. 

A meadowsweet had come into that 
greenhouse and dwelt there in that abode 
of fine tropical flowers; and one night an 



m UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

elder tree had entered and is now as high 
as the house ; and at the end of the green- 
house grass has come in like a wave; for 
change and disaster are far-reaching and 
are only mirrored here. This desolate 
garden and its ruined house are a part of 
hundreds of thousands such, or millions. 
Mathematics will give you no picture of 
what France has suffered. If I tell you 
what one garden is like, one village, one 
house, one cathedral, after the German 
war has swept by, and if you read my words, 
I may help you perhaps to imagine more 
easily what France has suffered than if 
I spoke of millions. I speak of one garden 
in Arras ; and you might walk from there, 
south by east for weeks, and find no garden 
that has suffered less. 

It is all weeds and elders. An apple- 
tree rises out of a mass of nettles, but it is 
quite dead. Wild rose trees show here 
and there, or roses that have run wild like 
the cats of No Man's Land. And once I 
saw a rosebush that had been planted in 



A GARDEN OF ARRAS 63 

a pot, and still grew there as though it 
still remembered man, but the flowerpot 
was shattered like all the pots in that garden 
and the rose grew wild as any in any hedge. 

The ivy alone grows on over a mighty 
wall, and seems to care not. The ivy alone 
seems not to mourn, but to have added 
the last four years to its growth as though 
they were ordinary years. That corner of 
the wall alone whispers not of disaster, 
it only seems to tell of the passing of years, 
which makes the ivy strong, and for which 
in peace as in war there is no care. All 
the rest speaks of war, of war that comes 
to gardens, without banners or trumpets 
or splendour, and roots up everything, and 
turns round and smashes the house, and 
leaves it all desolate, and forgets and goes 
away. And when the histories of the war 
are written, attacks and counter-attacks 
and the doom of Emperors, who will re- 
member that garden ? 

Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watch- 
ing the garden paths, were the spiders' webs 



64 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

that had been spun across them, so grey 
and stout and strong, fastened from weed 
to weed, with the spider in their midst 
sitting in obvious ownership. You knew 
then as you looked at those webs across all 
the paths in the garden that any whom you 
might fancy walking the small paths still, 
were but grey ghosts gone from thence, no 
more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, 
something altogether weaker than spiders' 
webs. 

And the old wall of the garden that 
divides it from its neighbour, of solid stone 
and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that 
mighty old wall that held the romance of 
the garden. I do not tell the tale of that 
garden of Arras, for that is conjecture and 
I only tell what I saw, in order that some 
one perhaps in some far country may know 
what happened in thousands and thousands 
of gardens because an Emperor sighed, and 
longed for the splendour of war. The tale 
is but conjecture, yet all the romance is 
there; for picture a wall over fifteen feet 



A GARDEN OF ARRAS 65 

high built as they built long ago, standing 
for all those ages between two gardens. 
For would not the temptation arise to 
peer over the wall if a young man heard, 
perhaps songs, one evening on the other side ? 
And at first he would have some pretext 
and afterwards none at all, and the pretext 
would vary wonderfully little with the 
generations, while the ivy went on growing 
thicker and thicker. The thought might 
come of climbing the wall altogether and 
down the other side, and it might seem too 
daring and be utterly put away. And then 
one day, some wonderful summer evening, 
the West all red and a new moon in the 
sky, far voices heard clearly and white 
mists rising, one wonderful summer day, 
back would come that thought to climb 
the great old wall and go down the other 
side. Why not go in next door from the 
street, you might say. That would be 
different, that would be calling; that 
would mean ceremony, black hats, and 
awkward new gloves, constrained talk and 



66 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

little scope for romance. It would all be 
the fault of the wall. . 

With what diffidence, as the generations 
passed, would each first peep over the wall 
be undertaken. In some years it would 
be scaled from one side, in some ages from 
another. What a barrier that old red wall 
would have seemed ! How new the ad- 
venture would have seemed in each age 
to those that dared it, and how old to the 
wall ! And in all those years the elders 
never made a door, but kept that huge and 
haughty separation. And the ivy quietly 
grew greener. And then one day a shell 
came from the East, and, in a moment, 
without plan or diffidence or pretext, 
tumbled away some yards of the proud old 
wall, and the two gardens were divided no 
longer : but there was no one to walk in 
them any more. 

Wistfully round the edge of the huge 
breach in the wall, a Michaelmas daisy 
peered into the garden, in whose ruined 
paths I stood. 



AFTER HELL 



VIII 
AFTER HELL 

HE heard an English voice shouting 
" Paiper ! Paiper ! " No mere spell- 
ing of the word will give the intonation. It 
was the voice of English towns he heard 
again. The very voice of London in the 
morning. It seemed like magic, or like 
some wonderfully vivid dream. 

He was only a hundred miles or so from 
England ; it was not very long since he 
had been there ; yet what he heard seemed 
like an enchanted dream, because only the 
day before he had been in the trenches. 

They had been twelve days in the trenches 
and had marched out at evening. They 
had marched five miles and were among 
tin huts in quite a different world. Through 
the doorways of the huts green grass could 



70 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

be seen and the sun was shining on it. It 
was morning. Everything was strangely 
different. You saw more faces smiling. 
Men were not so calm as they had been 
during the last twelve days, the last six 
especially : some one was kicking a foot- 
ball at somebody else's hut and there was 
excitement about it. 

Guns were still firing : but they thought 
of death now as one who walked on the 
other side of the hills, no longer as a neigh- 
bour, as one who might drop in at any 
moment, and sometimes did, while they 
were taking tea. It was not that they 
had been afraid of him, but the strain of 
expectancy was over; and that strain be- 
ing suddenly gone in a single night, they 
all had a need, whether they knew it or not, 
of something to take its place, so the foot- 
ball loomed very large. 

It was morning and he had slept long. 
The guns that grew active at dawn had 
not waked him ; in those twelve days they 
had grown too familiar, but he woke wide 



AFTER HELL 71 

when he heard the young English soldier 
with a bundle of three-days'-old papers 
under his arm calling "Paiper, Paiper !" — 
bringing to that strange camp the voice of 
the English towns. He woke wide at that 
wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily, 
on desolation with a tinge of green in it, 
which even by itself rejoiced him on that 
morning after those twelve days amongst 
mud, looking at mud, surrounded by mud, 
protected by mud, sharing with mud the 
liability to be suddenly blown high and to 
come down in a shower on other men's 
helmets and coats. 

He wondered if Dante when he came up 
from Hell heard any one calling amongst 
the verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call 
such as merchants use, some trivial song 
or cry of his native city. 



A HAPPY VALLEY 



IX 
A HAPPY VALLEY 

THE enemy attacked the Happy Val- 
ley." I read these words in a paper 
at the time of the taking of Albert, for the 
second time, by our troops. And the 
words brought back Albert to me like a 
spell, Albert at the end of the mighty 
Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway of 
Mars down which he had stalked so tre- 
mendously through his garden, the wide 
waste battle fields of the Somme. The 
words brought back Albert at the end of 
that road in the sunset, and the cathedral 
seen against the West, and the gilded 
Virgin half cast down but incapable of 
losing dignity, and evening coming down 
over the marshes. They brought it back 
like a spell. Like two spells rather, that 



76 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

some magician had mixed. Picture some 
magician of old in his sombre wonderful 
chamber wishing dreams to transport him 
far off to delectable valleys. He sits 
him down and writes out a spell on parch- 
ment, slowly and with effort of aged mem- 
ory, though he remembered it easily once. 
The shadows of crocodiles and antique gods 
flicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty 
flame as he writes; and in the end he 
writes the spell out wrongly, and mixes 
up with the valleys where he would rest 
dark bits of the region of Hell. So one 
sees Albert again and its Happy Valley. 

I do not know which the Happy Valley 
is, for so many little valleys run in and out 
about Albert; and with a little effort of 
imagination, having only seen them full 
of the ruin of war, one can fancy any of 
them being once named happy. Yet one 
there is away to the east of Albert which 
even up to last Autumn seemed able to 
bear this name, so secluded it was in that 
awful garden of Mars ; a tiny valley running 



A HAPPY VALLEY 77 

into the wood of Becourt. A few yards 
higher up and all was desolation, a little 
further along a lonely road and you saw 
Albert mourning over irreparable vistas 
of ruin and wasted fields ; but the little 
valley ran into the wood of Becourt and 
sheltered there, and there you saw scarcely 
any signs of war. It might almost have 
been an English valley by the side of an 
English wood. The soil was the same 
brown clay that you see in the South of 
England above the downs and the chalk; 
the wood was a hazel wood such as grow 
in England, thinned a good deal, as Eng- 
lish hazels are, but with several tall trees 
still growing; and plants were there and 
late flowers such as grow in Surrey and 
Kent. And at the end of the valley, just 
in the shadow of that familiar homely wood, 
a hundred British officers rest forever. 

As the world is to-day perhaps that ob- 
scure spot, as fittingly as any, might be 
named the Happy Valley. 



IN BETHUNE 



X 

IN BETHUNE 

UNDER all ruins is history, as every 
tourist knows. Indeed the dust that 
gathers above the ruin of cities may be 
said to be the cover of the most wonderful 
of the picture-books of Time, those secret 
books into which we sometimes peep. We 
turn no more perhaps than the corner of a 
single page in our prying, but we catch a 
glimpse there of things so gorgeous, in the 
book that we are not meant to see, that it 
is worth while to travel to far countries, 
whoever can, to see one of those books, 
and where the edges are turned up a little 
to catch sight of those strange winged 
bulls and mysterious kings and lion-headed 
gods that were not meant for us. And out 
of the glimpse one catches from odd corners 



82 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

of those volumes of Time, where old cen- 
turies hide, one builds up part by guesses, 
part by fancy, mixed with but little knowl- 
edge, a tale or theory of how men and 
women lived in unknown ages in the faith 
of forgotten gods. 

Such a people lived in Timgad, and left 
it probably about the time that waning 
Rome began to call home her outposts. 
Long after the citizens left the city stood 
on that high plateau in Africa teaching 
shepherd Arabs what Rome had been : 
even to-day its great arches and parts of 
its temples stand : its paved streets are 
still grooved clearly with the wheel-ruts 
of chariots, and beaten down on each side 
of the centre by the pairs of horses that 
drew them two thousand years ago. When 
all the clatter had died away Timgad stood 
there in silence. 

At Pompeii city and citizens ended to- 
gether. Pompeii did not mourn among 
strangers, a city without a people, but was 
buried at once, closed like an ancient book. 



IN BETHUNE 83 

I doubt if any one knows why its gods 
deserted Luxor, or Luxor lost faith in its 
gods, or in itself; conquest from over the 
desert or down the Nile, I suppose, or 
corruption within. Who knows ? But one 
day I saw a woman come out from the back 
of her house and empty a basket full of 
dust and rubbish right into the temple at 
Luxor, where a dark green god is seated, 
three times the size of a man, buried as 
high as his waist. I suppose that what I 
saw had been happening off and on pretty 
well every morning for the last four thou- 
sand years. Safe under the dust that that 
woman threw, and the women that lived 
before her, Time hid his secrets. 

And then I have seen the edges of stones 
in deserts that might or might not have 
been cities : they had fallen so long that 
you could hardly say. 

At all these cities whether disaster met 
them, and ruin came suddenly on to 
crowded streets ; or whether they passed 
slowly out of fashion, and grew quieter 



84 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

year by year while the jackals drew nearer 
and nearer; at all these cities one can 
look with interest and not be saddened 
by the faintest sorrow for anything that 
happened to such a different people so 
very long ago. Ram-headed gods, al- 
though their horns be broken and all their 
worshippers gone ; armies whose elephants 
have turned against them ; kings whose 
ancestors have eclipsed their faces in heaven 
and left them helpless against the onslaught 
of the stars ; not a tear is given for one of 
these to-day. 

But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, 
as desolate as Timgad amongst its African 
hills, you see the remnant of a pack of 
cards lying with what remains of the stock 
of a draper's shop ; and the front part of 
the shop and the snug room at the back 
gape side by side together in equal misery, 
as though there had never been a barrier 
between the counter with its wares and 
the good mahogany table with its decanters ; 
then in the rustling of papers that blow 



IN BETHUNE 85 

with dust along long-desolate floors one 
hears the whisper of Disaster, saying "See; 
I have come." For under plaster shaken 
down by calamity, and red dust that once 
was bricks, it is our own age that is lying ; 
and the little things that lie about the 
floors are relics of the twentieth century. 

Therefore in the streets of Bethune the 
wistful appeal that is in all things lost far 
off and utterly passed away cries out with 
an insistence that is never felt in the older 
fallen cities. No doubt to future times 
the age that lies under plaster in Bethune, 
with thin, bare laths standing over it, will 
appear an age of glory ; and yet to thou- 
sands that went one day from its streets 
leaving all manner of small things behind, 
it may well have been an age full of far 
other promises, no less golden to them, no 
less magical even, though too little to stir 
the pen of History, busy with batteries 
and imperial dooms. So that to these, 
whatever others may write, the twentieth 
century will not be the age of strategy but 



86 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

will only seem to have been those fourteen 
lost quiet summers whose fruits lie under 
the plaster. 

That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies 
on the age that has gone, as final, as fatal, 
as the layer of flints that covers the top 
of the chalk and marks the end of an epoch 
and some unknown geologic catastrophe. 

It is only by the little things in Bethune, 
lying where they were left, that one can 
trace at all what kind of house each was, 
or guess at the people who dwelt in it. It 
is only by a potato growing where pave- 
ment was, and flowering vigorously under 
a vacant window, that one can guess that 
the battered house beside it was once a 
fruiterer's shop, whence the potato rolled 
away when man fell on evil days, and found 
the street no longer harsh and unfriendly, 
but soft and fertile like the primal waste, 
and took root and throve there as its fore- 
bears throve before it in another Continent 
before the coming of man. 

Across the street, in the dust of a stricken 



IN BETHUNE 87 

house, the implements of his trade show 
where a carpenter lived when disaster came 
so suddenly, quite good tools, some still 
upon shelves, some amongst broken things 
that lie all over the floor. And further 
along the street in which these things are 
some one has put up a great iron shutter 
that was to protect his shop. It has a 
graceful border of painted irises all the 
way up each side. It might have been 
a jeweller that would have made such a 
shutter. The shutter alone remains stand- 
ing straight upright, and the whole shop is 
gone. 

And just here the shaken street ends 
and all the streets end together. The rest 
is a mound of white stones, and pieces of 
bricks with low, leaning walls surrounding 
it, and the halves of hollow houses; and 
eyeing it round a corner, one old tower of 
the cathedral, as though still gazing over 
its congregation of houses, a ruined, melan- 
choly watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, 
but no more streets. It is about the middle 



88 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

of the town. A hawk goes over; calling 
as though he flew over the waste, and as 
though the waste were his. The breeze 
that carries him opens old shutters and 
flaps them to again. Old, useless hinges 
moan ; wall-paper whispers. Three French 
soldiers trying to find their homes walk 
over the bricks and groundsel. 

It is the Abomination of Desolation, not 
seen by prophecy far off in some fabulous 
future, nor remembered from terrible ages 
by the aid of papyrus and stone, but fallen 
on our own century, on the homes of folk 
like ourselves : common things that we 
knew are become the relics of bygone days. 
It is our own time that has ended in blood 
and broken bricks. 



IN AN OLD DRAWING-ROOM 



XI 

IN AN OLD DRAWING-ROOM 

THERE was one house with a roof on it 
in Peronne. And there an officer came 
by moonlight on his way back from leave. 
He was looking for his battalion, which 
had moved, and was now somewhere in 
the desolation out in front of Peronne, 
or else was marching there, no one quite 
knew. Some one said he had seen it march- 
ing through Tincourt ; the R. T. O. said 
Brie. Those who did not know were always 
ready to help, they made suggestions and 
even pulled out maps. Why should they 
not? They were giving away no secret, 
because they did not know, and so they 
followed a soldier's natural inclination to 
give all the help they could to another 
soldier. Therefore they offered their 



92 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

suggestions like old friends. They had 
never met before, might never meet again ; 
but La France introduces you, and five 
minutes' acquaintance in a place like Pe- 
ronne, where things may change so pro- 
foundly in one night, and where all is so 
tense by the strange background of ruin 
that little portions of time seem very 
valuable, five minutes there seems quite 
a long time. And so they are, for what 
may not happen in five minutes any day 
now in France? Five minutes may be a 
page of History, a chapter even, perhaps a 
volume. Little children with inky fingers 
years hence may sit for a whole hour try- 
ing to learn and remember just what hap- 
pened during five minutes in France some 
time about now. These are just reflections 
such as pass through the mind in the moon- 
light among vast ruins and are at once 
forgotten. 

Those that knew where the battalion 
was that the wandering officer looked for 
were not many ; these were reserved and 



IN AN OLD DRAWING-ROOM 93 

each spoke like one that has a murder on his 
conscience, not freely and openly : for of 
one thing no one speaks in France and that 
is the exact position of a unit. One may 
wave one's hand vaguely eastwards and 
say "Over there", but to name a village 
and the people that occupy it is to offend 
against the silence that in these days broods 
over France, the solemn hush befitting so 
vast a tragedy. 

And in the end it seemed better to that 
officer to obey the R. T. O. and to go by 
his train to Brie that left in the morning; 
and, that question settled, there remained 
only food and sleep. 

Down in the basement of the big house 
with a roof there was a kitchen, in fact 
there was everything that a house should 
have ; and the more that one saw of simple 
household things, tables, chairs, the fire in 
the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings 
and even windows, the more one wondered ; 
it did not seem natural in Peronne. 

Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room 



94 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

with high ornamental walls, and all the air 
about it of dignity, peace and ease, that 
were so recently gone; only just, as it 
might have been, stepped through the 
double doorway ; skirts, as it were of ladies 
only just trailed out of sight; and then 
turn in fancy to that great town streaming 
with moonlight and full of the mystery 
that moonlight always brings, but without 
the light of it; all black, dark as caverns 
of earth where no light ever came, blacker 
for the moonlight than if no moon were 
there ; sombre, mourning and accursed ; 
each house in the great streets sheltering 
darkness amongst its windowless walls, 
as though it nursed disaster, having no 
other children left, and would not let the 
moon peer in on its grief or see the mon- 
strous orphan that it fondled. 

In the old drawing-room with twenty 
others the wandering officer lay down to 
sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars 
that came to the cities of France a long 
while ago. To just such houses as this, 



IN AN OLD DRAWING-ROOM 95 

he thought, men must have come before 
and gone on next day to fight in other 
centuries; it seemed to him that it must 
have been more romantic then. Who 
knows ? 

He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few 
more officers came in in the early part of 
the night, and talked a little, and lay down. 
A few candles were stuck on tables here and 
there. Midnight would have struck from 
the towers had any clock been left to strike 
in Peronne. Still talk went on in low 
voices here and there. The candles burned 
low and were fewer. Big shadows floated 
along those old high walls. Then the talk 
ceased and every one was still : nothing 
stirred but the shadows. An officer mut- 
tered in sleep of things far thence and was 
silent. Far away shells thumped faintly. 
The shadows, left to themselves, went 
round and round the room, searching in 
every corner for something that was lost. 
Over walls and ceiling they went and could 
not find it. The last candle was failing. 



96 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS , 

It flared and guttered. The shadows raced 
over the room from corner to corner. Lost, 
and they could not find it. They hurried 
desperately in those last few moments. 
Great shadows searching for some little 
thing. In the smallest nook they sought 
for it. Then the last candle died. As the 
flame went up with the smoke from the 
fallen wick all the great shadows turned 
and mournfully trailed away. 



THE HOMES OF ARRAS 



XII 
THE HOMES OF ARRAS 

AS you come to Arras by the western 
road, by the red ramparts and the 
Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. 
With such a dignity as clings to the ancient 
gateway so might a king be crowned ; 
with such a sweep of dull red as the old 
ramparts show, so might he be robed; 
but a dead king with crowned skull. For 
the ways of Arras are empty but for brown 
soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones. 

Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, window- 
less, carpetless ; Arras sleeps as a skeleton 
sleeps, with all the dignity of former days 
about it, but the life that stirs in its streets 
is not the old city's life, the old city is 
murdered. 

I came to Arras and went down a street, 



100 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

and saw back gardens glinting through the 
bare ribs of the houses. Garden after 
garden shone, so far as it could, though it 
was in October and after four years of war ; 
but what was left of those gardens shining 
there in the sun was like sad faces trying 
to smile after many disasters. 

I came to a great wall that no shell had 
breached. A cascade of scarlet creeper 
poured over it as though on the other side 
some serene garden grew, where no dis- 
aster came, tended by girls who had never 
heard of war, walking untrodden paths. 
It was not so. But one's fancy, weary of 
ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever 
facts are hidden, though but by a tottering 
wall, led by a few bright leaves or the 
glimpse of a flower. 

But not for any fancy of mine must you 
picture ruin any more as something graced 
with splendour, or as it were an argosy 
reaching the shores of our day laden with 
grandeur and dignity out of antiquity. 
Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and 



THE HOMES OF ARRAS 101 

has no curious architecture or strange 
secrets of history, and is not beautiful or 
romantic at all. It has no tale to tell of 
old civilizations, not otherwise known, told 
of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is 
destruction and sorrow and debt and loss, 
come down untidily upon modern homes 
and cutting off ordinary generations, smash- 
ing the implements of familiar trades and 
making common avocations obsolete. It 
is no longer the guardian and the chronicle 
of ages that we should otherwise forget : 
ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble 
round us before it has ceased to be still 
green in our memory. Quite ordinary 
wardrobes in unseemly attitudes gape out 
from bedrooms whose front walls are gone, 
in houses whose most inner design shows 
unconcealed to the cold gaze of the street. 
The rooms have neither mystery nor adorn- 
ment. Burst mattresses loll down from 
bedraggled beds. No one has come to 
tidy them up for years. And roofs have 
slanted down as low as the first floor. 



102 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

I saw a green door ajar in an upper room : 
the whole of the front wall of the house 
was gone : the door partly opened so oddly 
on to a little staircase, whose steps one could 
just see, that one wondered whither it 
went. The door seemed to beckon and 
beckon to some lost room, but if one could 
ever have got there, up through that 
shattered house, and if the steps of that 
little staircase would bear, so that one 
came to the room that is hidden away at 
the top, yet there could only be silence and 
spiders there, and broken plaster and the 
dust of calamity : it is only to memories 
that the green door beckons; nothing 
remains. 

And some day they may come to Arras 
to see the romance of war, to see where the 
shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. 
It is not this that is romantic, not Mars 
but poor, limping Peace. It is what is left 
that appeals to you, with pathos and in- 
finite charm, little desolate gardens that 
no one has tended for years, wall-paper left 



THE HOMES OF ARRAS 103 

in forlorn rooms when all else is scattered, 
old toys buried in rubbish, old steps un- 
trodden on inaccessible landings : it is 
what is left that appeals to you, what 
remains of old peaceful things. The great 
guns throb on, all round is the panoply of 
war, if panoply be the right word for this 
vast disaster that is known to Arras as 
innumerable separate sorrows, but it is not 
to this great event that the sympathy turns 
in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor 
the trappings of it, guns, lorries, and frag- 
ments of shells : it is to the voiceless, de- 
serted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, 
that all the heart goes out : floors fallen 
in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing, 
roofs as though crazed with grief and then 
petrified in their craziness ; railings, lamp- 
posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by that 
frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and 
torn : it is what is left that appeals to you. 
As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, 
gaunt shape, the ghost of a railway station 
standing in the wilderness haunting a waste 



104 UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS 

of weeds, and mourning, as it seemed, over 
rusted railway lines lying idle and purpose- 
less as though leading nowhere, as though 
all roads had ceased, and all lands were 
deserted, and all travellers dead : sorrowful 
and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb 
in the desolation among houses whose doors 
were shut and their windows broken. And 
in all that stricken assembly no voice spoke, 
but the sound of iron tapping on broken 
things, which was dumb awhile when the 
wind dropped. The wind rose and it 
tapped again. 



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